President Donald Trump shocked Capitol Hill Republicans on Wednesday by quickly agreeing to a deal proposed by House and Senate Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Trump signed on to a three-month extension of the deadlines to raise the nation’s debt limit and fund the government, avoiding a shutdown, and attaching the deal to a bill for hurricane aid.

House and Senate Republican leaders, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, were pressing for an 18-month extension to delay the difficult votes and limit the negotiating leverage of Democrats. Just an hour earlier, Ryan had called the Democrats’ three-month proposal “ridiculous.”

But Trump has a limited window of time to get anything done, and if he believes Republicans on Capitol Hill have steered him wrong before, he has good reason.

It wasn’t his idea to start with health care reform instead of tax reform, a decision by Capitol Hill Republicans that ended badly. And the president probably wonders how Republican lawmakers have the nerve to expect party loyalty when few if any of them have defended him against an onslaught of what-if allegations over the Russia Thing That Has No Name, or alleged crime.

Now it’s September, and anything that isn’t done by Christmas may not get done at all. With the entire Congress and a third of the Senate up for re-election next year, polarized politics will make compromises even harder.

Back in May, the administration urged Congress to increase the debt ceiling before the August recess, to avoid a last-minute crisis in the fall when there was so much other work to do. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asked again in June. And again in July.

But the House Freedom Caucus, a group of members who are fiscally hawkish — or stubbornly responsible, depending on your point of view—demanded that any debt limit increase be tied to measures to cut spending and balance the budget. So it didn’t get done at all.

Will the conservative group be more flexible in the future now that they’ve seen Trump surprise them by making a deal with Democrats? Like a scar from a knife fight, it’s a reminder of what can happen. Capitol Hill Republicans may find their collective mind highly concentrated by the prospect of irrelevancy, despite being in the majority.

On to tax reform. There may also be another try at a health care bill, or an unexpected deal for immigration reform and a border wall at the same time. Trump just showed that he’s willing to do whatever it takes, and if anybody doesn’t like it, they shouldn’t watch.

Sometimes the world is watching.

It’s a legend of the Cold War that when President Ronald Reagan threatened to fire the nation’s striking air traffic controllers, and then he really did it, the phone lines between the Russian embassy and the Kremlin burned up all night.

“I think it convinced people who might have thought otherwise that I meant what I said,” Reagan later reflected.

Today, North Korea is threatening the United States with nuclear weapons. The president has pointedly not ruled out a U.S. military attack. “I would prefer not going the route of the military, but it is something certainly that could happen,” Trump said on Thursday.

If Kim Jong Un is toppled by his own generals, it may be because this week, they saw the scar from the knife fight.

Susan Shelley is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter: @Susan_Shelley.

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